Heh, I'm out of it for a little while and this thread explodes with talk of conspiracies and blu-ray requests.

I know everyone's waiting for the transfer files and I don't blame anyone for getting upset it's taking so long. The truth is I've been putting in 10-12 hour days at work the last couple months and projects like this haven't been at the top of my priority list.

Here's the deal. I'm currently RARing and PARing the original X0 ANH transfer files and getting ready to upload them to a.b.starwars.

The original files we received from Laserman were AVIs encoded in HUFFYUV @23.976 fps and uncompressed PCM audio. The total file size is about 35GB (per film).

ESB and ROTJ will follow, though I will have to retrieve them from by backup discs first. And as I mentioned before, I am missing an entire LD side from ROTJ which was never sent to me, and may not exist anymore unless MeBeJedi was ever able to get it from Laserman.

If people really want it, I can upload a copy of the timecode print. (To clarify, the TC print was a 700MB DivX5 compressed version of the X0 transfer with burned-in timecode and we used it as a reference.)

I'm currently having some issues trying to create PAR2 files (I keep getting a "could not allocate output buffer" error in QuickPar). If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

To me that "Look sir, droids" shot just looks like it could be color corrected 2004 DVD footage.

That's what I thought too and the fact that it is cut off on both ends at exactly the time which would reveal it as an SE shot (just after the digital Dewback would be out of the frame at the beginning and just before the wipe to the new SE sandcrawler at the end) only supports that theory.

I need to look up the actual conversation on our private board where Laserman posted about that shot, but I'm pretty sure one of the sources is the 2004 DVD. That's why it's cut off at the beginning and doesn't show the dewback. Keep in mind that this was the first shot he ever completed with the Black Magic workstation and that it was never meant to be released or actually used in the X0 project (obviously, since it isn't the full shot). I assume a few of you are paranoid or whatever, but you need to believe me when I say that I'm giving you exactly what Laserman presented to the rest of us way back when. If he says this was a direct output from Black Magic, then that's exactly what it is.

Sorry for dropping off the map the last couple of weeks. My internet went down at home and my modem still isn't working. I'm actually posting from a Kinko's right now because my cable modem is currently running at the blazing fast speed of about 56K. :|

Now, to answer a few questions:

bkev said:

Luckily, those are two of the shots that needed the work the most! Thanks, Zion. I still hope one day we'll see a raw capture, at least, but I think these two shots are more important to the community.

This is exactly the reason Laserman chose them. The worst shots are the easiest to demonstrate what a great job the black magic process could do.

none said:

Zion since the thread is yours, might want to update the first post with the recent 'here's where things stand post' link.

It's not going to make the bumps go away, but it'll make the explanations easier, "go see first post".

Done.

boba feta said:

I'm curious to know how the untouched capture compares to the GOUT, both pre and post g-force script.

It's much better than the untouched GOUT. I'm not sure how it compares to the g-force script, as I have yet to take a good look at the output of the script, but you'll soon be able to judge that for yourselves.

pittrek said:

BTW guys do you plan to put your website back online ? Or post it to some free webhosting service ?

I've archived it to my personal site, but that's down right now as well. Once I've got it back online, I'll post the link.

Harmy said:

"I want it all, I want it all, I want it now!!!"

No seriously, these two shots would be awesome to have, especially this one:

In GOUT this shot looks like sh*t (possibly the worst shot in the whole thing), so it would be extremely valuable for any future reconstruction (I would have loved to use this in my SW PDE to get rid of the stupid dinosaur but the GOUT quality was too bad) so maybe in v.3.0...

Sadly, this is the shot I'm having trouble locating at the moment. I'll have to do some more digging on my other drive and see if I maybe saved it to a different location than the other one. If I can't find it, it means I never actually got it from Laserman, or that he never actually sent it to me in the first place, which would suck.

Darth Editous said:

Zion, can you give any more detail as to what such a piece of software would specifically need to do?

DE

A little history on Black Magic:As far as I know, "Black Magic" was the name of the workstation (yes, a workstation, not just a software application) Laserman was able to borrow from his office. If you guys didn't know, Laserman used to work for Weta Studios in Australia, so this had to be built on some sort of cutting edge in-house software that the public didn't have access to.

Obviously, since it wasn't just a piece of software, Laserman couldn't copy it and send to anyone. And I'm assuming he eventually had to take the workstation back to the office, so I'm guessing it's back in the hands of Weta Studios.

What Black Magic actually did was take several different sources of the same video (e.g. different LD captures of Star Wars), analyze them for similarities and differences, and output a new pristine version of the video mostly free of any analog noise or other nasties, and with outstanding detail.

I recall one of the last things Laserman suggested on our private forum was to try and use an application built on MatLab to emulate the output from Black Magic. I downloaded it once upon a time, but I never had the time to devote to teaching myself another programing language to get the thing running, much less learn how to use it. I'll try and see if I can find some more specifics on that and post them here.

And for your viewing pleasure, Laserman's Black Magic version of the "Look sir, droids" shot:http://www.megaupload.com/?d=82CNJW13 (This is an AVI either uncompressed or in HuffYUV. I don't know for sure because this machine won't tell me.) Enjoy. And here's hoping I can find the other one.

At some point soon (probably in a couple weeks), I'll try to see if I can't upload ANH to a.b.sw.

I already posted about the money stuff and Laserman in this thread a year or two ago. I guess nobody remembers.

We've kind of been asking each other the last couple years what we should do, and really since nothing has happened I think the best thing to do might just to release what we have. I'll try to get the black magic shots up in the next couple of days. My personal site is down at the moment though so I'll have to use MegaUpload or something.

The XØ Team doesn't really exist anymore and hasn't for some time. No one has heard from Laserman in I don't know how many years. (The guy had cancer, use your imagination.)

The money we received very early on was used for shipping expenses, a hard drive or two and a monitor calibration device. The rest was spent on hosting fees for the x0project.com site (which no longer exists) and then a huge batch of t-shirts and hats just before we lost contact with Laserman for good and everything went to crap.

That's where the money is, guys. In a $500 box full of X0 merchandise nobody will ever want because the project is never going to be completed. At least not until some sort of black magic-like software comes available that will allow us to combine the LD captures together (XØ and Japanese DefCol) that I spent hours pouring over, manually IVTCing, matching up frame for frame, and noting where any and all frame differences occured.

I have no idea how far MeBe ever got on cleaning up the footage, so you'll have to ask him about that.

I do have a couple of things I can share though. One would be a beta video of the kick-ass DVD menu I created. The other would be the two shots Laserman was able to output from the black magic workstation. The first is the "Look sir, droids!" shot, and the other is the panning shot of Luke's speeder as it enters Mos Eisley. Both were sent to me as targa image sequences, so I'll have to make them into uncompressed avi's and try to post them. I know where the first one is on my old drive, but the second one might take a little more work to locate.

Aside from that, the original X0 captures are still in existance save for one side of one of the ROTJ LDs, which I don't know that we ever got from Laserman (it was missing when he originally sent us the discs). Mebe may have gotten it from him but I don't know for sure.

I was thinking the same thing, adywan. It would be awesome if they restored all the deleted scenes to HD, including all the shots from the OT that had been removed/replaced, much like they finished and released all the deleted scenes on the prequel DVDs.

Be careful with FF3dfilter dont abuse it or the image will be full of jaggies. Second QTMC convert it to 59.976 fps , are you using SelectEven / SelectOdd to put it to 29.976 progressive? This video is pure interlaced so it will never be very smooth like the original source if you deinterlace it.

Is better if you use

separatefields()selectevery(4,0,3)weave()

This come at the end of the script to convert it again to 29.976 interlaced.Always work in Avi without compression i recommend you Lagarith.

I'm using Avisynth MT, yes, though it doesn't seem to like having both QTGMC and SSSharp in the same script and keeps crashing. For now, I'm not using any of the MT stuff.

Using the combination of QTGMC, FFT3DFilter, and SSSharp has resulted in zero jaggies as far as I can tell, which is a relief. And yes, I am using SelectEven to revert back to 29.97fps. Reinterlacing at the end is probably the best way to go unless the filters don't require progressive video.

What I'll probably end up doing is splitting my master script into two separate ones, outputting the first half to a lossless codec (I've always used HuffYUV), then running that through the second half and outputting once more. Then I can run that into Premiere for the color correction.

I haven't had a chance to work on this since I posted the screens, but hopefully I'll have some time in the next week or two.

Thanks Sluggo. There are a few things I'm not happy with, as I don't think I've yet found the right balance between denoising and sharpening, and I'm still running tests to try and find the best settings for each filter, but overall it's looking pretty good. I will say that a lot of these shots look even better in motion though.

To expand on what I've been working on, I've been experimenting with using a few avisynth filters I've previously never used, such as QTGMC for deinterlacing, GradFun2DBmod to remove color banding, and SSSharp for sharpening. The results so far are amazing.

For my v1 release, I used the unsharp mask filter in Premiere, which did a decent job, but unfortunately left unsightly jaggies everywhere. Also, I didn't use any noise filtering whatsoever (and it appears I forgot to deblock as well). Notice how much cleaner v2 is in comparison.

(Screens were taken using AvsPmod. First frame is the original interlaced source, the second is v1 taken from the DVD, the third is v2 without any color correction.)

Customized scripts will be created for the commercials and the animated segment. The output will then go into Premiere for color correction. The one thing I'm not really happy about at the moment is the ghosting, but I don't know of a good way to get rid of it.

Just a heads up that I've been playing around with some new avisynth filters the last few days and the WBBM video is looking better than ever. (It pays to check out the doom9 forums more than once every blue moon.) I'll post some screens tomorrow or Monday.

So is the audio track something that you're looking to release in the near future, TheThirdGathers (or perhaps your friend)? Those of us who have already created our own versions of Backstroke of the West would love to add this audio track to our existing DVDs.

I actually screened Backstroke at a local sci-fi convention last April using the DVD I created and posted about in marioxb's thread. To my amazement, the theater I was showing it in was packed and we had to turn some people away because we were full. I'm looking to show it again this year and this dubbed version would be perfect!